Hu and Jo we salute you!

The day started like any other, an ignored 7:30am alarm call, arriving several hours later at 11am, forgetting to read the time of the last shuttle to the Great Wall, missing the last shuttle by 30minutes, sitting disappointed on the steps reveling in our laziness and deciding what else to do with the day, and the plan for our second try the next day.

Photo: Adam Fletcher

“The guide book says if we had four people its only 400 RMB a day to hire a taxi. We need to find two other people,” I said.

“Hello, do you speak English?”

Bingo!

I look up to see two Asian men, one has just hit the other and they are both laughing hysterically at the stupidity of asking us if we speak English.

“Yes, a little I reply” making the international symbol for a little with my thumb and index finger.

“Ah okay, we would like to go to the Great Wall, do you know which route we have to take?”

(If I were an expert on Great Wall travel information would I be sitting on a step holding a Great Wall map looking disappointed, 30mins after the last bus)?

So, after explaining to them that they, like us, are lazy, and too late, we tried to coax them into sharing a taxi between the four of us. They were not keen.

“But Chinese people will try to trick us, they try to steal things from your stomach!”

“You mean kidneys?”

“Yeah, yeah your kidneys, we heard stories before we came here about it.”

Geez, Korean people are a little paranoid. “Maybe in the past, but the Olympic Games are here in half a year I think they’ve progressed a little since the kidney stealing days of the past, maybe out in the middle of nowhere. But in Beijing, in a registered taxi, I’m pretty sure we’ll end the trip with both kidneys.”

Photo: Romainguy

Slowly after long negotiations with the taxi driver and many repetitions of exactly what we wanted we managed to convince the Koreans that it was safe to get into the car. The 1hr journey passed easily, spent bonding with Hu and Jo:

“Are you man and wife?”

“No, but we’re a couple”

“Ah, so are we (trying to hug Hu, both laughing). We met during Military service in Korea, we are macho men.”

“What job did you do during your Military Service?”

“We did paperwork”

“Oh, very macho paperwork I bet”

We discussed my love of Korean Cinema and Korean Electronics, what age you get married at in Korea (usually around thirty), that Korea is nothing like China in a 100 and one ways that make it definitely better, and exploring the never ending depths of Korean Paranoia:

“You’re from England? Very Dangerous; there, lots of racists. My friends were in McDonalds in London and people……threw trash at them. Not a safe place. People there look down on the yellow people. ”

“You’re from Germany? Oh, also very dangerous many hooligans there!”

I just hoped the Great Wall was still hooligan-free or we’d have to hide the Koreans in the boot. Hu and Jo were hugely entertaining, taking nothing seriously, always laughing, joking and playing; it was like traveling to the Great Wall with two Labrador puppies. As the Great Wall came into site and we pulled into the car park, there were Korean squeals of oohs and aahs, which only increased as we began the climb up the wall. They entertained us all the way. If there was a tunnel, they were running through it, they took photos every step both on the way up and down of them in a variety of poses - I’m superman, I’m a dog running on all fours, I’m muscle man, they had boundless energy and soon raced off well ahead of us taking photos at a rate of one memory card full a minute.

Photo: d’n’c

The wall was everything that we’d been told and more, stunning. The photos will describe it better than I could even try. I still had a fever, but tried valiantly to complete the ascent, not helped by having a really bad throat and cough, being a mouth-breather, having no breakfast, and being very lazy by nature. I was soon overtaken by a waddling, overweight, middle-aged woman as I lay flat out on my back frantically hunting for just a little more oxygen, while Annett force-fed me cake.

Annett graciously walked at my pace, pretending that she had more gears to walk faster, as if she were such a good girlfriend and required to water and feed her wiltering plant…

Photo: Adam Fletcher

For Part Two of the Korean Great Wall check back next week!
See the original post by Adam Fletcher on Zig.co.uk

***

Expat Corner> The Family is the Country of the Heart Part One
China Explorer>Bazaar Experiences in China’s New Frontier: Kashgar
China Explorer> Three Wheeling in China-Rickshaws and Trici-car-axis Part One

Warning：The use of any news and articles published on eChinacities.com without written permission from eChinacities.com constitutes copyright infringement, and legal action can be taken.